Despite its gruesomeness, this gag usually gets a good laugh. But for some-the children of divorce-the laugh is bittersweet. The unhappy truth that emerges from the latest research is that in the long run, divorce is beneficial for the mismatched spouses, but intensely disturbing to the kids. For them, our soaring divorce rates are little comfort. In 1960, the number of marriages in the U.S. outnumbered divorces by nearly four to one; by 1970 it was three to one, by 1980 only two to one. The persistence of the divorce boom has enabled scientists to complete a substantial volume of research on the effects of divorce on children, including several long-term projects tracking their subjects into adulthood. Results vary by group, sex and age. But it now seems clear that:

Judith Wallerstein and Joan Berlin Kelly, authors of the seminal work "Surviving the Break Up: How Parents and Children Cope with Divorce," found that few of the kids in their follow-up survey agreed with their parents' decision to divorce-even five years after the parents separated. (These results are part of the researchers' continuing study of 144 middle- and upper-middle class California children of divorce.) In a 10-year follow-up, published last month in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Wallerstein reported that among the 38 young people in the original study who were between 6 and 8 at the time their parents split, over half later viewed the divorce as "the central experience in their lives." A majority expressed "feelings of sadness or neediness, of a sense of their vulnerability," and were "burdened by intense worries about failure in present and future relationships . . . and by an overall sense of their own powerlessness."

Eighteen months after the divorce, children perceive the father with less respect; and half of the 9-to-12-year-old boys openly rejected him as role model. But by the five-year mark, there was a clear correlation between the health of the relationship with the father and the child's attitude toward the divorce: Those who still felt the divorce had been a mistake (approximately 28 percent) had a bad relationship with the custodial mother or yearned for their father. Boys between 9 and 13 expressed particular longing for their fathers and worried that their own masculinity was in jeopardy without a role model. However, the survey also found that while the children who were still depressed five years after the divorce generally had neglectful fathers, a caring and involved father was no talisman against gloom, especially if the mother was inadequate.